A karate chop to a human face forever

The Extremely Mature Horrors of D&D’s Book of Vile Darkness

Are you ready to get extremely MATURE? The Book of Vile Darkness is the mascara-smeared goth face of Dungeons & Dragons. This is Glenn Danzig and his shelf of werewolf books and erotic comics. Released just in time for Halloween, 2002, the book seemed to embrace all of the criticisms leveled against past editions of Dungeons & Dragons by outsiders condemning role playing games It reveled in gruesome rituals, human sacrifice, and sadism. This was the D&D of Jack Chick comics in full color and with creepy illustrations. You were not just encouraged to play evil characters by the Book of Vile Darkness, you were encouraged (after multiple warnings about mature content) to embrace occult evil. The book was controversial, extremely well produced, weird, silly, stupid, and a little bit genuinely creepy. It was easily the most memorable book of 3rd Edition D&D.

Steve: I want to start out right out of the gate with: this book rules.

Steve: So if you came here expecting a FATAL-style takedown on The Book of Vile Darkness you came to the wrong gringo.

Zack: I am the gringo you want to see about that.

Steve: Seriously?

Zack: This thing is plastered with all the MATURE stickers of an Exalted book and includes things like how to make your character a rapist or a horse fucker.

Steve: It doesn’t say either of those things explicitly, it just describes those as psychotic behavior.

Zack: Well, anyway, this book gets credit for being a foray into mature themes, I guess, but it wasn’t until the last few years that any RPG games were really dealing with that sort of thing in a mature way.

Steve: What the heck does that mean?

Zack: It means that if you were an awesome DM and talked things out very clearly with your group, there might be some dark night of the soul journey you could do with these rules, but most of this stuff is standard D&D powers and rules with a veneer of gruesome horror.

Steve: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Zack: It’s a neutral thing put in the hands of many teenagers and immature twenty-somethings who probably ran really, really fucking miserable gross campaigns of D&D after this book came out.

Steve: I assure you the campaign I ran based on the Book of Vile Darkness was very mature.

Zack: Careful, Steve, I may put that to the test in the future.

Steve: Be still my black heart of psychotic nightmares.

Zack: As long as it isn’t the horse fucking nightmares.

Steve: Just in case you forgot. This book is MATURE.

Zack: It’s for mature players.

Zack: You can tell because there are tits at the start of every chapter.

Steve: Evil hooters.

Zack: There is no such thing as evil tits, only those who might wield the tits for evil.